Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of social networking and more particularly to social bookmarking content.
Description of the Related Art
Content browsing refers to the retrieval and presentation of electronic content in a browser client. Content generally can include electronic documents, messages, audio, audiovisual and video materials and imagery. Most commonly, content can be stored in a server environment and published for access by content consumers over a computer communications network such as the global Internet. Content consumers, in turn, can retrieve content over the network by reference to a network address for the content. Once retrieved, the content can be presented in a browser client including not only conventional visual browsers such as the venerable Web browser, but also in alternative browsers such as those deployed in pervasive devices and those supporting different modes of presentation such as the audible presentation of material. In other cases the content can be a physical object, like a book, and content browsing can retrieve the physical location of the book, for example in a library or other information associated with the object.
Given the vast amount of content published for accessibility over the Internet, modern content browsers provide a mechanism for ably retrieving previously accessed content. Known as a “bookmark” or “favorite” (collectively referred to as a bookmark), end users can record content of interest as a bookmark. Subsequently, end users can access a list of bookmarks in order to recall the content of interest without being compelled to recall from memory the precise uniform resource indicator (URI) for the content of interest.
While bookmarking reflects the personal experience of individual users, social bookmarking provides a foundation for users within a social group to store, organize, share and search the bookmarks collectively established by the users within the social group. In operation, in a social bookmarking system, users save links to memorable content. Unlike traditional bookmarks; however, in a social bookmarking system the links subsequently can be published for public inspection and use, so as to provide a communal repository of bookmarks. Consequently, groups of the users can access the links encapsulated within respective social bookmarks, though the groups of users in fact may never have viewed the associated content—a prerequisite for a traditional bookmark.
Social bookmarking services often encourage users in a social network to annotate bookmarks with meta-information rather than merely storing bookmarks in a traditional file hierarchy. One such type of meta-information is a simple descriptive text label referred to in the art as a “tag”. As such, users processing annotations for a social bookmark can view the social bookmark for content along with meta-information pertaining to the bookmark, for instance the number of users having bookmarked the content. Further, some social bookmarking services infer clusters of bookmarks from the relationship of corresponding annotations. Finally, many social bookmarking services provide subscription based feeds for lists of bookmarks, including lists organized by annotations. Consequently, subscribers can become aware of new bookmarks as the bookmarks are saved, shared, and annotated by other users.
The visual display of social bookmarks can be reflected in the display of the tags used within the social bookmarking site. The visual display of the tags can vary according to the number of users in a social network who have bookmarked the corresponding content with that same tag. In particular, tag clouds often include tags with a font size commensurate with a number of users in the social network whom have bookmarked the corresponding content with that same tag. In this way, a visual glance of the content will indicate which aspects of the content are most interesting to the social network at large as the font size of the different words in the content will vary relative to the other words according to the popularity of the different words.